Product Description

'It's the end of the 1916 winter and the conditions are almost unbelievable. We live in a world of Somme mud. We sleep in it, work in it, fight in it, wade in it and many of us die in it. We see it, feel it, eat it and curse it, but we can't escape it, not even by dying...'. Edward Lynch enlisted when he was just 18 - one of thousands of fresh-faced men who were proudly waved off by the crowds as they embarked for France. It was 1916 and the majority had no idea of the reality of the Somme trenches, of the traumatised soldiers they would encounter there, of the innumerable, awful contradictions of war.Private Lynch was one of those who survived, and on his return home in 1919, wrote "Somme Mud" in pencil in over 20 school exercise books, perhaps in the hope of coming to terms with all that he had witnessed there. Written from the perspective of an ordinary 'Tommy' and told with dignity, candour and surprising wit, "Somme Mud" is a testament to the human spirit, for out of the mud that threatened to suck out a man's soul rises a compelling story of humanity and friendship. It is a rare and precious find.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7450 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

SOLDIER Magazine, March 2008
'His observations on life in the line and of his emotions in battle strike a chord. Difficult to put down - it has the feel of being written by a soldier for soldiers'

BIRMINGHAM POST, 8 March 2008
'This vivid first-hand account of the experiences of an ordinary infantryman, Somme Mud reaches us as the voice of an ordinary, but highly literate, private soldier who simply endured the horrors that surrounded him and got on with his job'

The Good Book Guide, March/April 2008
'In its honesty and earthiness it has quite justifiably been compared with ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT... a fresh look at life in a front-line trench'

Customer Reviews

Probably the truest account of Western Front soldiering.
There are books about the Great War, and then there is Somme Mud.

The days of glorified war stories are over, and this book takes the reader on a gritty, totally from-the-heart account of every horrific day in the Western Front.

Whilst full of frightening moments, it also conveys the real sense of comradeship and frequent dark humour of those serving under conditions none of us can know today.

What struck me most about this book was the reminder that the prospect of being sniped, shelled (sometimes by your own side), gassed, or just drowned in flooded shell holes, was present every moment of just about every day. It's also a stark reminder of the appalling conditions men endured for several years.

A brilliant book that ranks amongst the best ever written in terms of actually comprehending - as far as we can today - what men went through, far from home.

Somme Mud
I bought this book as it sounded an interesting read. At first the way it is written takes a bit of getting used to, it isn't written after all by a professional story teller - the original text was penned by a soldier, Private Lynch, on returning from the Great War where, as an Australian infantryman, he fought in the front line and acted as a 'runner' for his CO. On his return in 1919, amazingly still alive, he wrote it all down in a number of exercise books as a method of making sense and coming to terms of the whole experience. The book is written as a diary and describes the every day life of a soldier on the front line. He gets wounded a couple of times and describes the deaths of others around him but, amazingly, he comes through scrape after scrape. The horror of his situation is all too real right down to the hand to hand trench bayonette fighting and the tragic losses on both sides. There are plenty of WW1 books written to clinically analyse the battles but Private Edward Lynch had the foresight to write down what he and others actually experienced. Some of the things he describes are vivid and horific but we all have a duty to read books like this, in my opinion, so we don't forget that we owe them our respect.

Outstanding WW1 Memoir
This is a great memoir, instantly ranking with book such as frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die as among the most evocative voices of the Great War as seen by the PBI. Lynch was an Australian, fighting with the 45th Battalion AIF from late 1916 to the end of the war. The centrepieces of this book are the descriptions of hand to hand trench fighting, which are raw and immediate. The most chilling description (apart from numerous descriptions of shellfire) are the images of the Somme battlefield in the freezing winter of 1916-1917, with casualties still frozen into the postures of brutal trench combat.

This is the Great War memoir of our time, if such as statement isn't something of a paradox. Lynch's Australian sensibility, his cheerful challenges to authority and the democratic flavour of Anzac `mateship' are more attuned to a 20th century sensibility than some of the more literary laments to the `futility' of the war in the 1920s and 1930s. (The attitudes to other races in the opening chapter are shocking but not surprising for a memoir of the time; their omission would have been a pointless and historically dishonest piece of editing).

A singular and powerfully important memoir of 1914-1918.